ok, let me try again. Making the journey interesting is a matter of adventure design. If the players know that Bob the evil mage is holed up in Luskan with the chalice of ultimate power, nothing that happens along the way to Luskan will be interesting or fun no matter how good your random tables are, or your challenging but simple supply mechanics are. It will just be a pain in the ass between characters and the story.
However, if players only know that Bob went north with the chalice, then the journey becomes interesting. And you can use new journey mechanics to roll up encounters along the way, or you can just design them yourself. But some of the encounters should have clues to where Bob is going with the chalice.
thats an interesting and engaging journey. But that’s adventure design. i didn’t get the Level Up DM book with the journey mechanics, so maybe I’m speaking out of place here, but I read the summary of how it works, and even if you can roll 6 d20s and suddenly conjure the entirety of Forgotten Realms out of thin air It will still be a pointless place unless the DM attaches a story to the abandoned cabin, ettercap snare, and tricky crevasse.
i don’t doubt for a second that new journey mechanics are fantastic for filling the spaces between with interesting stuff. I do doubt that players will give a crap about them unless DM imbues that stuff with meaning. Which, brings me back to point, new mechanics fix nothing, DM still has to make journey matter or skip it.